The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

by Mariana Enríquez

Juancho was drunk that day. He was getting belligerent as he walked up and down the sidewalk, although by that point no one in the neighborhood felt threatened, or even unsettled, by his drunken antics.

She called to us to come see. We came to the window and all three of us peered through the blinds with her: my brother, my dad, and me. The man, who wasn’t wearing underwear under his filthy dress pants, shat on the sidewalk: soft shit, almost diarrhea, and a lot of it. The smell reached us, and it stank as much of alcohol as it did of

“Get up, you bastard, you get up and hose down Horacio’s sidewalk—you can’t fuck around here—and then get back to whatever slum you crawled out of, you son of a motherfucking bitch.”

They even let her sleep without dreams she could remember, and when she turned out the bedside lamp one night, she didn’t feel the sheets grow cold as a tomb.

Wisely, treacherously, that city takes its revenge.

Suddenly the girl turned around, looked Sofía in the eyes, and said, with a thick Catalan accent but in very clear Spanish, “No puedo más.” I just can’t. Then, she pulled down her pants and defecated on the sidewalk, an explosive, painful diarrhea that made her scrunch up her face from the twisting cramps in her intestines. Then she collapsed against the wall. She missed falling into her own shit by a fraction of an inch.

“A friend of ours was arrested because he painted a slogan that said, ‘Tourists, you’re the terrorists.’ They gave him like four months. Poor guy,” said Julieta.

One of the boys stank; he stank because his one and only set of clothes was also his mattress. That kid wanders around the city, he fills it with his stench so no one ever forgets him. They say the social workers couldn’t get the clothes off him because they were stuck to his body with dirt. They say he had lice, but also white worms in his scalp, and sores under his arms, from the dirt; no one had ever bathed him. He was a little animal, he shat himself from fear and didn’t clean it off. That’s the kid most people see, the most popular ghost, the one who touches you with his black hands, the one who brushes against the jacket slung over your chair and leaves it stinking of dead meat. But there are also kids who fell off balconies after their junkie mothers left them there. Kids who had keys hung around their necks at three, four years old. Kids who murdered taxi drivers and died of overdoses, whored themselves out, went looking for crack.

The Lady Upstairs always wanted to tell the girl, the daughter of the current owner, not to be afraid. There was nothing to fear. She was there, it was true, but the girl couldn’t sense her, didn’t see her; no one could sense her, unless, of course, she took on shape. But without shape she was denied presence. It wasn’t that the girl had any special sensitivity: she was just terrified. She went running past the stairs that led to the hotel’s lookout, imagining that there, in the tower—which for years had been the tallest building in Ostende—a crazy woman was hiding, a witch with long hair who wore a white nightgown and gazed at herself in a mirror. The girl was afraid, too, of the Italian cook who added wood to the boiler, afraid of him even after he was fired

She thought about approaching them, maybe taking one of them to bed—why not? she hadn’t had sex in a year—but she knew it wouldn’t happen, people can smell desperation, and she reeked. She saw girls defying the wind in their bikinis, and she waited for the rain to come, she let it soak her. And when her long hair was dripping onto her pants, when the cold water was running from her neck to her chest and belly, she took the razor out of her pocket and started making precise cuts on her arm, one, two, three, until she saw the blood and felt the pain and something similar to an orgasm. Let it stay cold, so she could cover herself. Though she didn’t really care. She was only afraid some charitable soul would notice, take pity on her, and make the feared phone call to Buenos Aires or the ambulance or the suicide hotline.

When she returned to the hotel she asked if she had received any calls. “No, dear,” the receptionist told her, all smiles. In the room, she sank into the bathtub and went back over the cuts, so the blood would float around her and turn the

water red. It

She put her head underwater and opened her eyes to an ocean...

And lock her in. And maybe reveal her true form before leaving her alone up there.

As the desperation was spreading to teenagers in the country’s interior, the discovery of Espina’s body provoked an unheard-of terror among disoriented parents. Santiago’s body had been found in a hotel room near the Once Station, his whole body flayed: he had used a razor and a knife to carefully skin his arms, legs, stomach. On his left arm, he’d sliced to the bone. In his chest you could see his sternum. And finally, possibly semi-unconscious, he’d slit his jugular with a bold, precise cut. He had not mutilated his face. One of the policemen charged with forcing the lock on the door of the room said that it had reminded him of a walk-in freezer: it was the middle of winter, and Santiago had left the air conditioner on. There were several conspiracy theories about a possible murder, but they were ruled out when it was leaked that the room had been locked with a key from the inside, and the suicide note was published, almost illegible because of the nervous handwriting and the bloodstains. It said: “Meat is food. Meat is death. You all know what the future holds.”

That afternoon the news filtered to the media. Two teenagers had dug up Santiago Espina’s coffin using a shovel and their own hands. The grave, only a month after his burial, still didn’t have the definitive marble slab that would have made their task more difficult. But the exhumation was just the beginning. The girls had opened the casket to feed on Espina’s remains with devotion and disgust; around the grave, pools of vomit bore witness to their efforts. One of the policemen threw up too. “They left his bones clean,” he told the TV reporter, who, shaken, was speechless for the first time in his career. The girls were brought in a patrol car to the station, and there it was decided they’d be taken to a private clinic. The police said that Julieta and Mariela had never cried, or even spoken to them; they only whispered into each other’s ears and held hands the whole time.

And they listened to the last song on Meat (the one where Espina whispers, “If you are hungry, eat of my flesh. If you are thirsty, drink from my eyes”), dreaming of the future.

He showed me a few of the videos, but they were boring. Watching people fuck is boring. Neither Nico nor I could understand why the pornography business rakes in millions.

At that age there’s music playing in your head all the time, as if a radio were transmitting from the nape of your neck, inside your skull. Then one day that music starts to grow softer, or it just stops. When that happens, you’re no longer a teenager. But we weren’t there yet, not even close, back when we talked to the dead. Back then, the music was at full blast and it sounded like Slayer, Reign in Blood.